Native Son: Winery takes root on family farm

Native Son: Winery takes root on family farm

Editor’s note: The following article was reprinted from the August issue of Thrive: Life in Our Town and Beyond. To read more of The Courier-Tribune’s award-winning magazine, call 626-6111 to subscribe.

FRANKLINVILLE — In fields where tobacco once flourished, a new crop has taken over. Planted deep in land that Tammy Smith played on as a child, next to the family farm where she grew up, are the muscadines. Muscadines are the native grapes first mentioned by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584 before the United States came into existence. They are as rooted into the soil of North Carolina as her family.

Her winery, Native Son Vineyard, came about from her desire to preserve the land for agricultural purposes as her parents had before her. Her hope was to leave that legacy to her son and his son as well. Her grandparents moved here in the 1930s.

“This is all ours. This is all I’ve ever known. I live in the end of where our pasture was at one point,” she says.

Smith grew up on land adjacent to where the winery is located at 1511 Mamie May Road, Franklinville. As land became available, they bought it and added to their property. Her memories are rich with days of working the land with her parents, first in tobacco and later chickens. Her voice is tinged with regret as she notes that the days of the whole family working the farm together have mostly gone.

The inspiration for making wine came when Smith and her husband were considering what to do when they retired. Her son was attending the horticulture program at North Carolina State University at the time. Making wine sounded appealing, but they didn’t like the high degree of handling required by traditional European wine grapes. But she remembered eating muscadines as a child. Smith recalled going out and finding them in the nearby woods or getting some off the trellis her grandparents grew.

“I thought they were special because you couldn’t go to the grocery store and get them all year round,” Smith says.

“You are blessed with them from September into October and you’d eat just as many of them as you could or you froze them or made jelly or juices and stuff.”

While her son took classes in viticulture at the university, Smith took the same classes online. She also talked to her daddy about her dream, hoping to involve more of her family in the endeavor. He told her it was like any other type of farming – you learn from your experiences.

She also began reading everything she could and discovered that North Carolina had a long history in winemaking. They started planting in March of 2009, laboriously putting in each post. Their blood and sweat literally went into this venture. Smith’s son got his hand caught in a posthole driver and lost part of two fingers.

“Basically, we pounded in each of those posts. You sit there and you pound and you pound and you pound. We bought all that wire to string it up. It was an effort just getting things up and running. It was all of us,” she says, including her husband, son, parents and brother.

Muscadine vines live for many years. It’s not unusual for vines to live 30, 40, 50 years. North Carolina’s coast is home to the Mother Vine which is believed to be over 400 years old. Some believe early colonists discovered Native Americans cultivating it. Smith notes before Prohibition, North Carolina produced a lot of wine, predominantly muscadine.

“Muscadines are native to the southeastern United States. You can’t find them native growing on the West Coast, Canada or anywhere else. That’s why they do so well down here. They don’t have any bugs and diseases that really affect them. Veniferas (European wine grapes) get all sorts of mildews, insects and pierce disease.”

The Smiths have about 4 acres in grapes, all hand planted beginning while her son was still in school. They learned a lot from family nurseries that raise muscadines and gave them advice on growing them. One of the big shocks was how deeply they needed to prune them. In late February or early March they cut away about 70 percent of the vine. Smith was horrified the first time they did it.

“I thought, ‘Oh no, we killed them.’ We put them in the ground. We cut back almost everything to about nothing and I was sure they were all going to die!” she says. “But no, they came out with a vengeance and then by midsummer, they had quadrupled in size. They just love it (being pruned).”

Native Son remains a hands-on operation. The grapes are harvested by hand when their Brix level (sugar) is at its highest. Rather than snip off entire bunches, the loosely clustered muscadines are “tickled” off by Smith and her family. They fill 50-pound lugs with grapes and when they reach 1,000-2,000 pounds, they ship them to Benjamin Vineyards & Winery of Saxapahaw with whom they have a custom-crush relationship.

Smith has always felt protective of the land she grew up on. She notes that although she always said she wanted it growing up, she never had an inkling it would one day be hers.

“I always thought that someone would want to come up here and put in a big housing development on it because you can come up here and see the mountains,” she says.”It would hurt me because it was always supposed to be farmed – that’s the way I felt.

“That was my whole purpose in doing something like this. A lot of our farmland is already in conservation easements so the land can’t be developed. I wanted to make sure there would be something here for my son and his kids or my nephew and his kids.”

Future dreams for Native Son include becoming a bonded winery and more open to the public. Smith envisions their vineyard being a place where families can bring their children to pick grapes off the vine and feel a connection with the land. She has no desire to become a large commercial winery, but instead wants to be small enough that they can talk to people about what the land means to them. She hopes to have their wine served in local restaurants. Most of all, she wants to leave something tangible behind.

“I am a part of this land. When I pass away I want to be cremated and put back on my land. I love my land that much. I want to embrace it. I want people to enjoy it because they are not making any more of it. I want it to keep going and growing and sustaining itself and provide folks down the road with something they can be proud of and say that’s part of our family.”

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And, the difference is?

All scuppernongs are muscadines. Not all muscadines are scuppernongs. Scuppernongs are large members of the muscadine (Vitis rotundifolia) family with a bronzy-green color. Other muscadines are smaller and range in color from deep brown to purplish black. The grape was found in abundance along the Scuppernong River in North Carolina. The name is thought to derive from the Algonquin Indian word, askuponong, meaning place of the sweet bay tree.